“Cheshire Puss… Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where,” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, many salespeople have the…

A couple of years ago, Forrester Research issued a report that warned that the advent of new technologies – most notably, the Internet of Things (IoT) – would lead to the elimination of one out of every five B2B sales jobs. That’s a million salespeople across the U.S. And, on the surface, that…

I’ve been in a Support role for several years, four of which have been with CallidusCloud, and as a result, I’ve learned a few things about the relationship between a company and its customers. A particularly important thing I’ve discovered is that in order to learn about customers’ experiences and…

In my role, I get to talk to all kinds of people – including CEOs and sales leaders – and one of the themes of a favorite war story is the deal that got away not because it was lost during a battle with competitors but because the lucrative customer had zero awareness of the company. Oftentimes,…

There are some things in business that are hard to research, and they are that way for very practical reasons. People don’t like to admit when they make mistakes. You might hear executives spouting the vapid bromide“fail fast, fail often,” but you’re not going to hear them speak in detail of those…

Customer engagement and customer experience are often confused and frequently relegated to the care of the marketing department. In both cases, that’s a major error: customer experience should be a part of everyone’s job description, and engagement is starting to become an all-hands responsibility…

The last two years have seen a fresh wave of attention paid to customer feedback. The previous wave, initiated by the wider availability of inexpensive survey tools, saw a lot of surveys and efforts to elicit customer interactions. These were effective – to a point. In many organizations, the sheer…

In this era of the enabled customer – one in which research is at the customer’s fingertips and in which the salesperson must provide value when it’s asked for – sales enablement and sales content management is critical. Salespeople can’t keep an index in their heads of what content is new, what…

Last night at dinner, a tech-industry pal of mine was trying to puzzle out why the term “artificial intelligence” had suddenly become the in-vogue buzzword of the month. I pointed out that Marc Benioff has telegraphed that an A/I-like thing called Einstein will be the centerpiece of his Dreamforce…

Where does your company keep its unsung heroes? If you’re like most companies, you can find them in Sales Operations. They set the stage for every sale, and while they may not appear on any leaderboards or get called out for applause at sales meetings, their efforts ensure that your sales machine…